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Harbor but also puts them in their larger political context, based on information he diligently gathered after the war from both Northern and Southern participants. Crawford’s letters and diary in the Library of Congress provide even more detail. Abner Doubleday’s Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876) is another valuable source, colored somewhat by the author’s own cantankerous personality; it provides the fullest description of the move from Moultrie to Sumter. The first volume of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: The Century Company, 1887) contains other, briefer, eyewitness accounts. The Robert Anderson Papers in the Library of Congress offer many clues to the enigmatic commander’s experience at Sumter, as well as his earlier career, including fan letters, poems, and testimonials that he received from Northerners (and a few Southerners) during the siege.

The story of the Sumter crisis has been narrated many times by later historians. Among the best and most authoritative accounts, Maury Klein’s Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) is notable for its richness of detail and deft interweaving of events in Washington and Charleston. David Detzer’s Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), a fast-paced narrative, provides especially rich portraits of the various participants in the Sumter standoff. W. A. Swanberg’s First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957) offers another well-researched account. Nelson D. Lankford’s Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to the Civil War, 1861 (New York: Viking, 2007) is especially strong in its treatment of the political struggles in the border states during the secession crisis.

For the changing meanings of the American flag, see especially Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer’s The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), as well as Scot M. Guenter’s The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990) and Michael Corcoran’s For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

Chapter One: Wide Awake

For Ralph Farnham, see C. W. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill (Boston, 1860); as well as contemporary newspaper accounts. George B. Forgie’s Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, W. W. Norton, 1979) is a provocative and important book that has unfortunately fallen somewhat out of favor; it offers an ingenious interpretation of the complicated feelings that the Civil War generation bore toward its antebellum parents and Revolutionary grandparents.

A magisterial survey of America’s transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century (although it stops a dozen years before the story in this book begins) is Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2008).

There are surprisingly few good secondary sources on the presidential campaign of 1860, especially treating the Lincoln campaign as a grassroots cultural phenomenon rather than simply a product of machinations among Republican leaders. Burlingame’s Lincoln biography, cited above, offers some useful details. Gil Troy’s lively chronicle of American presidential campaigns, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Harvard University Press, 1996), includes a chapter on Lincoln’s two campaigns. See also Wayne C. Williams, A Rail Splitter for President (University of Denver Press, 1951) and William E. Gienapp, “Who Voted for Lincoln?” in John Thomas, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (University